I lived at the square in a cozy railroad apartment. At the time, I was an insomniac who devoted hours to studying classics.  I translated the Gettysburg Adress into Greek in the style of Lysias,  a whimsical task assigned by my Greek Composition professor.  Who thought these things up, I wondered?  It was in the tradition of the nineteenth-century gentleman reading classics at Oxford or Harvard.   I would never become  a nineteenth-century gentleman, but I might well be the reincarnation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who also translated Greek.

But what to do about the loneliness?  There I was, stuck in a carrel at the library, consulting reference books, dictionaries, classical journals, re-translating Lysias’s speeches, and skimming a biography of Abraham Lincoln (that was unnecessary). Sometimes I dragged my books down to the cafeteria for a snack and coffee.  It was the refuge of raggedy, wild-eyed, incoherent students who had not slept in days and barely remembered their names.  There should have been a sign above the coffee pot:  WE NEVER SLEEP.

And then it happened: someone was giving away free Siamese kittens at the market.  She was wild, but it was love at first sight. Here’s what no one told me:  Chloe knew Greek.

It was no longer necessary to live in the library. Chloe helped me:  she batted at my Bic pen when I wrote in a spiral notebook,  guiding me to refine my prose.  She sat in the dictionary when I tried to look up kakodaimon (“evil genius”).

“Chloe, don’t you want to look up kakodaimon?”

She did not.  And so I affectionately called her Kakodaimon if she left footprints in the cornbread, ripped the curtains while speedily climbing them as if they were Mount Everest, or knocked over the Christmas tree.

Chloe was not thrilled when we adopted other cats.  One day she led them through the back of cupboard to a crawl space between the floors.  One of the cats got lost.  We called her name repeatedly to guide her back through the portal.

I wonder why we didn’t name any of our later cats Chloe. Some people do that. If their dog is Fluffy, all their later dogs are called Fluffy.

But we have never had another Siamese. And it wouldn’t be right to call a calico or tuxedo cat Chloe. 

And they probably wouldn’t answer to it anyway.